Web & Internet Definitions

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Definition of PERL

Short for Practical Extraction and Report Language, Perl is a programming language developed by Larry Wall, especially designed for processing text. Because of its strong text processing abilities, Perl has become one of the most popular languages for writing CGI scripts. Perl is an interpretive language, which makes it easy to build and test simple programs.

PERL is a powerful, compact programming language that draws from the capabilities of languages like C, Pascal, sed, awk, and BASIC, Perl is emerging as a main language of choice for CGI programs. This is partly due to its portability and the many platforms on which it is currently supported, and also due to its ability to easily manipulate text and ease of use of system services in UNIX.